Fra ord til handling. En kritisk diskursanalyse av handlingsplaner

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The main purpose of this thesis is to examine how communicative purposes of the genre action plans are represented and promoted through lexicogrammatical and textual features, and to evaluate and decide which features that contribute to restraining and promoting these purposes, respectively. The methodological framework used, is critical discourse analysis as described by Fairclough (2001, 2003a), in which the systemic functional linguistics of Halliday (1994) plays an important role. The documents investigated are Action plan for gender equality 2007-2009, University of Oslo, and Action plan to prevent discrimination against gay and lesbians (2007), Hordaland City Council. Based on the communicative purposes of strategies identified by Pälli, Vaara et Sorsa (2009), the following purposes have been adopted for investigating plans of actions: Guidance for future action, education, self-legitimation, identity building, and promotion. The purpose demonstrate control and responsibility has been included in addition to the purposes mentioned.
The analysis suggests that the choice of speech acts is important; commissives and directives are essential in promoting the purpose of guiding future action, while declaratives play an important role in creating commitment to the importance of the issue itself, and by enhancing guidance for future action and identity building. A high frequency of modalisation markers results in doubt as to the sender's commitment to the necessity and importance of the actions stated and thereby inhibits promotion of the purpose guidance for future action. Furthermore, process metaphors and abstract concrete verbs obfuscate the meaning of the described actions while the many passives and nominalisations that figure in the documents lead to an interpretation of the actions as abstract and vague, as wells as making responsibilities unclear. The analysis further suggests that both the context and the complexity of the production process, as well as the concept of individual strategies, are essential for understanding how and which communicative purposes are being accomplished, and explaining the choices of expression in action plans.